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The Holocaust and the Historians Lucy S The Holocaust and the Historians Lucy S. Dawidowicz (noted intentionalist, ardent Zionist) Notes Chapter 01: Thinking About the Six Million: Facts, Figures, Perspectives Statistics of Death: The War 1. At least 35 million persons, perhaps even as many as 50 million, were killed during the Second World War in all theaters of operation. 2. Of all European countries, the USSR suffered the greatest loss of life in the war. a. Soviet military and civilian losses amounted to some 20 million. b. Other sources estimate that the Soviets lost about 11 million combatants and 7 million civilians. c. One and a half million (1.5) Soviet Jews were murdered. d. Three and a half million (3.5) Soviet P.O.Ws are believed to have been murdered by the Germans, gassed at Auschwitz, machine-gunned en masse, or shot in military-style executions. e. Hitler had issued a decree guaranteeing his armed forces immunity from subsequent prosecution for shooting enemy civilians (issued one month before Germany invaded the USSR). f. On June 06, 1941: Kommissarbefehl (Commissar Order) authorized combat troops to single out from their captured prisoners “political commissars of all kinds” and to kill them. i. Soviet P.O.Ws lose protection of international law. 3. Poland ranks second in the number of war losses. a. Total of 6,028,000 deaths, about 22% of the prewar population b. (If Jewish losses were computed separately, the number is about 3 million, or 12.5% of the Polish Population.) c. Death by “direct military action” i. 644,000 ii. Presumably military personnel killed in combat and civilians killed in air raids and artillery fire d. Death by “victims of death camps, raids, executions, annihilation of ghettos, etc.” i. 3,577,000 (3 million were Jews) e. Death in “prison and other places of confinement, due to epidemics, emaciation, ill treatment, etc.” i. 1,286,000 f. “Deaths outside prisons and camps, caused by wounds, mutilation, excessive work, etc.” i. 521,000 g. About 10,000 Poles were killed in the first year of German occupation. h. In the later years, about 25,000 Poles were killed in mass executions, many in reprisal for resistance activities. 4. Yugoslavia a. 1.5 million Yugoslavs, about 9% of the population, were killed or disappeared b. 1.2 million of these were civilian casualties i. Mostly victims of German reprisals for the continuing guerilla warfare that the Yugoslavs conducted during the German occupation 5. Greece a. Similar circumstances to Yugoslavia b. 250,000, 3-4% of the Greek population, died 6. The Germans, who launched the war that brought these unprecedented statistics, suffered about 3.5 million combat casualties and 430,000 civilian casualties (mostly victims of air raids), about 8% of the German population in 1939. 7. France a. The number of persons who have been killed or missing: 600,000, about 1.5% of the population i. 200,000 were combat casualties ii. 400,000 were civilians (including about 90,000 Jews) who were killed in air raids, executed, or deported 8. Belgium a. Lost 50,000 lives, out of a population of just under 10 million 9. Great Britain a. 360,000 deaths (both military and civilians) from air raids- less than 1% of the population 10. The English and French probably lost more men in the Battle of Verdun in WWI than in all of WWII. 11. In places that Germany held power, German authorities targeted and arrested those thought to be politically dangerous, socially harmful, or economically expendable. a. Targeted: i. Communists ii. Socialists iii. Outspoken members of the clergy iv. Jehovah’s Witnesses (who refused to recognize National Socialism) v. Prostitutes vi. Homosexuals vii. ‘perverts’ viii. Professional criminals 12. The Germans developed a system of forced labor in the camps, and in the later years of the war, the slave labor of these prisoners became the backbone of the German war economy. a. 1,650,000 persons were incarcerated in these camps b. Over 1 million of them died or were killed c. Some died of “NATURAL” causes: huger, exhaustion, disease d. Those who could not work (the ailing, the sick, and the dying) were killed by gas chamber e. Hitler called the ill and dying “useless eaters” Statistics of Death: Mass Murder 1. Nazis saw this method of murder as “ideological warfare” and considered it conventional military war technique 2. The High Command of the German Armed Forces conducted the military war. 3. The SS, the dreaded armed police of the National Socialist movement, conducted the ideological war. 4. Both wars were concurrent undertakings, strategically and operationally meshed. 5. The mass murder represented itself as a holy war to annihilate Germany’s “mortal enemy” 6. The mortal enemy – Todfeind was Hitler’s word – consisted of the Jews, who were, according to doctrines of National Socialism, the chief antagonists to the German “Aryans.” a. Jews considered biological archenemy of the German people, whose physical presence, it was alleged, threatened the purity and even the very existence of the “Aryan” race. b. No other people, nation, or “race” held that status. 7. Racial purity was a Nazi obsession and embraced every aspect of life in the German dictatorship. 8. Within Germany itself, the euthanasia program claimed about 100,000 lives. 9. During the war, convoys of patients from mental institutions from various countries arriving at Auschwitz were sent straight to the gas chambers. a. No records were kept of their arrival or their murder; their numbers were estimated to be in the thousands. 10. According to Hitler’s racial doctrine, Slavs were believed to be sub-humans (Untermenschen). But no evidence exists that a plan to murder the Slavs was ever contemplated or developed. 11. The German racists assigned the Slaves to the lowest rank of human life. 12. The Germans thus looked upon Slavs as people not fit to be educated, not able to govern themselves, worthy only as slaves whose existence would be justified because they served their German masters. 13. Hitler’s racial policy with regard to the Slavs was “depopulation.” 14. The Slavs were to be prevented from procreating, except to provide the necessary continuing supply of slave laborers. 15. Whether the Russians- or other “non-Aryan” peoples- lived or died was, as Himmler once put it, “a matter of indifference.” a. Himmler justified the murder of the Jews as “an unwritten and never-to-be written page of glory” in German history. 16. The European Romani suffered enormous losses at the hands of the Germans, yet the National Socialist state had no clear-cut racial policy with regard to them. a. The Germans regarded the ‘Gypsies’ primarily as an antisocial element, consisting of thieves and vagrants, rather than as an alien racial group. 17. Investigations were made as to whether Gypsies were racially fit to be educated. (Official conclusion was ‘no’.) 18. Nazi officials established two basic categories, dividing the native Romani tribes from the foreign ones. a. The native tribes were defined as those who had settled in Germany since the 15th century, and hence were entitled to citizenship and the protection of German law. 19. When the Nazis began in 1941 to formulate a racial policy with regard to the Romani, no agreement on the matter had been reached by the top Nazi leaders. a. In 1943, the German occupying authorities in the Eastern areas ruled, with Himmler’s approval, that sedentary Gypsies and their offspring were to be treated as citizens of the country, whereas nomadic Gypsies and their offspring were to be treated as Jews (that is, murdered). 20. SS security forces, “cleansing” the occupied countryside of “dangerous elements,” murdered many gypsies on grounds that they were unreliable, unemployable, and criminal. 21. Only in the last year of the war did the Nazi ideologies begin to regard the Gypsies not only as an undesirable social element, but also as an undesirable racial element. 22. The statistics of the murdered Gypsies are gross estimates: of about 1 million Gypsies in the countries that fell under German control, nearly a quarter of them were murdered- machine-gunned or gassed. The Jews: A Special Case 1. Jews obsessed Hitler all his life and their presence in Germany, their very existence, preoccupied the policymakers of the German dictatorship. The Judenfrage- the question of the Jews- riveted all Germany. 2. Every German city, town, and village applied itself to the Jews and the Jewish question with rampant violence and meticulous legalism. 3. The German dictatorship devised two strategies to conduct its war of annihilation against the Jews: mass shooting and mass gassing. 4. Special-duty troops of the SS’s Security Service and Security Police, called Einsatzgruppen, were assigned to each of the German armies invading the Soviet Union. a. The Einsatzgruppen were given the task of rounding up the Jews and killing them. 5. The Jews were loaded on trucks or forced to march to some desolate area with antitank trenches already dug or natural ravines. 6. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg estimated that the Einsatzgruppen murdered about a million Jews. 7. To systematize the murder of the rest of the European Jews, the National Socialist state built six installations with large scale gassing facilities and with crematoria for the disposal of the bodies. a. These were all located on Polish territory: Oświeҫim (better known by its German name, Auschwitz), Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka. b. About 3.5 million Jews from every country of Europe were murdered there. c. (Approximately 1.5 million non-Jews were gassed in these camps, most at Auschwitz.) 8.
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